Salt and Fire (2016)

Salt and Fire (2016)A Werner Herzog film. On this info alone I decided to watch Salt and Fire. To be honest, I was disappointed. The acting is mediocre at best. Laura, played by Veronica Ferres comes across as wooden, which might have something to do with her being German speaking English? at least she looks attractive.Others here on IMDb have described the story, so I will spare you another interpretation. The story is basic, and needlessly stretched out. The biggest problem I had with the idea, was just how silly it was. Environmental issues caused by human activities make for interesting subject matter. Salt and Fire does not make for an interesting film.To give you an example of 'silly' and 'needlessly stretched out', Laura is abandoned with two blind children on a small cactus infested island surrounded for miles by salt (a dry salt lake). Rather than panic, she acts calm, spends some time teaching the children her name while getting to know theirs? Laura and the two children play a board game, which goes on for a tedious while. By this point I couldn't wait for the film to end.I'm all for long arty shots of landscapes, and Salt and Fire contains just these kind of shots. What lets them down was irritating music. I disliked the choice of music.Not recommended. 3/10 for the arty landscape shots.

You might enjoy this movie if you like to see molasses flowing down a glacier. You might enjoy this movie if you like pretentious dialog delivered with a strange, foreign rhythm and ponderous translation. You might enjoy this movie if you like a 'save the Earth' message carved into a baseball bat, that is then used to knock you repeatedly over the head. You might enjoy this movie if you like to see endless, boring terrain shots.You might enjoy this movie if you are a cinema masochist looking to severely torture yourself.If you don't adhere to any of the above mentioned criteria, I would strongly suggest passing on this one. Toward the end, I was holding a box cutter to my throat...

Why kidnap someone? So they'll write an impassioned article with more than just data! What is the kidnapped woman going to write an impassioned article about? Dunno! The salt flats and the volcano existed before humans got there, but apparently the kidnapper doesn't know this, and thinks he did something to cause the salt flats, so he needs an impassioned article about why he's a jerk even though he's not a jerk except for kidnapping people for no good reason.The paramilitary guys standing around looking serious in their ski masks all over the place for no apparent reason were funny.Best part of the movie: reading about the salt flats and volcano on the internet after the movie was over; it's a strange part of the world.

This review contains the plot spoiler in the film's own description used by Amazon. The opening scene we see Dr. Laura Summerfeld, cuffed, and blindfolded. The film then digresses 30 hours as we see her and two colleges fly in a plane and they all get kidnapped, taking us up to where we were. Why the flashback? I have no idea. One of the bad guys in a ski mask wears glasses and sits in a wheel chair. One of the guys she meets at the airport wears glasses and sits in a wheel chair. Once Laura's blindfold is removed, umm...Yeah, they thought it was stupid too. The 3 scientists are to survey an ecological disaster that destroyed a lake and is causing a salt flat to spread...soon it will encompass the world, we are told, although this salt flat is on an island so I had trouble with the math on that one. Oh yeah, volcano that will explode and kill the planet, some talk of aliens who like western fat chicks as predicted by Nostradamus or something. The dialogue was very idiotic attempting to go deep. And then Laura ends up on the salt flat with two blind boys. The whole kidnapping thing was idiotic. It sounded like they were playing Islamic prayer calls in this South America "desert" as background music. I kept thinking this was near Morocco or something. (Filmed in Bolivia). Plot didn't make sense. Film was slow moving. Acting was just a phone call away.